Psalm 91:1-6, 14-16 | Luke 16:19-31
It feels good to be home.
The nature of churches is such that I actually don’t know all of you, but Church of our Saviour sent me to seminary. This is my home. This was my church for most of thirty years. Baptized, Confirmed, bell choir, acolyte, two different occasions where I was asked to run into a service screaming dressed as John the Baptist… I’ve spent most of my life here. Who I am is very much because of who you are. This is where I learned to be a person, a Christian. If you’re new… stay for a couple decades, because this is a special place with deeply loving people gathered in the name of the Lord. I have missed this place, and often longed for here, for home.
Longing for home is a familiar refrain. In the modern era, more people than ever leave where they were born and settle down somewhere else. But this longing isn’t modern. There are mass migrations, exiles, refugees throughout history. Yearning for the home we’ve left, or the home that no longer exists is an ancient experience the people of God know a thing or two about.
This morning in Psalm 91, we see the dangers and fears of a people without a home. Calls for dwelling, shelter, refuge, and deliverance are intertwined with allusions to the protection we yearn for when we are displaced. The comfort of the Lord pitted against the hardships of the world.
The psalms, these prayers Christians have used for as long as there have been Christians, are chock full of fear and rage set against blessing and thanks. That is their design. Most psalms are originally music, but they are collected as a prayer book. And throughout, the poetry is either Lament…prayers of pain, confusion, and anger, prayers beseeching the Lord to intervene… Or Praise… the prayers of joy and celebration retelling the wondrous works of the Almighty. If you lay out 150 psalms, you see the beginning thick with lament, slowly building toward greater, more fervent, praise. A gradient from the pit of despair, where the world is, to the New Jerusalem, the promise of God’s salvation.
The context of many of these poems, their particular situation, is lost in the fog of time. What was going on when someone wrote Psalm 91 in particular? We don’t know. What we know is that the whole book of Psalms was compiled in exile. Solomon’s Temple was destroyed, God’s home-on-earth laid to waste, and, without it, the world of God’s people totally collapsed. So those with no place to worship God created a book of prayers to be the temple. You could carry it around. You could read it. You could memorize it and have it always with you even if the soldiers came, ripped you from your home, and carted you off into Assyria.
This is the relevant context. This is how we should read the Psalms. People without dwellings singing of dwelling in the shelter of the Most High. People for whom the world collapsed, their kingdom fallen, saying, He shall cover you with his pinions and you shall find refuge under his wings. We are bound to God in love. When we call, God answers. When we are in trouble God will be with us. It’s a 3000 year old prayer I’ve needed in every desperate moment of my life.
We’ve a lot of catching up to do over five years away from home. But Episcopalians skip breakfast on Sundays or something because we really do not want long sermons. So instead of five years, I’ll tell you about five hours from this summer where Psalm 91 was among my many, many, prayers.
Mary Margaret and I went to an appointment for a 36 week ultrasound and were told you can't leave, we gotta get this baby out immediately. The doctors believe her preeclampsia and dangerous swelling were Covid complications. After a grueling two days of induced labor and hours of fruitless pushing, our child was finally delivered with the help of drugs and horrifyingly large forceps. For about a minute we held Mac and the world was still.
A minute is not very long.
My wife began to seize and couldn’t be stabilized. She and Mac had different medical teams working in different parts of the room… and both survived. They’re healthy, happy; no lasting complications. I am very blessed. But for a few hours, two dozen people in this hospital are telling me either of them could die.
I’ve never been so powerless or desperate.
And all I had in the whole world, as my wife and child fought to live, were the things you gave me.
I prayed. Like I have never prayed before. It wasn’t beautiful, or academic, like the fancy books they make you read at seminary. It was Psalms. It was the Lord’s prayer. It was Job, As for me, I know that my redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. In the hardest, most terrifying moment of my life… and my religion wasn’t a club I’d joined. It wasn’t a set of intellectual principles to which I’d assented. It was just the only foundation I had to stand on in a world that had totally fallen away.
And I don’t think it all worked out because I prayed. We’ve all prayed for things that then did not work out… I had something of God’s love and presence in the praying, before I knew it’d be okay. It was all I had. It was what you gave me.
By being here. By being home. By teaching me how to live, pointing me in the direction of God’s love, and showing me that it matters. Our culture treats Christian witness as this deeply personal thing… and it ain’t. All this is about relationships—it’s about community. I’ve got good parents. I turned out alright because of Martha and Joe too…but they brought me here. They said we’re a people who go to church, look here’s these other people who go to church. And that was y’all.
You coming to church matters. You being here matters. You teaching Sunday School, leading Youth Group, being in the choir, packing backpacks…this community can’t happen unless someone shows up—it matters not just in the moment of whatever thing you’re doing. It might matter 35 years later in Inova Loudoun Hospital when because of you I had a God, a faith, a redeemer to turn to!
And we been stringing God’s love along like that, one relationship at a time, weaving it into every generation, for thousands of years. That’s how this fear, hope, and praise all wound up in the psalms. Jesus tells this very weird, kinda uncomfortable parable of the rich man and Lazarus, and the rich man’s like yo, you gotta send someone to tell my brothers because they’d live differently if they knew… and Abraham replies, dude they already know, they’ve got Moses and the Prophets.
And we have Moses and the Prophets…and the psalms, and the Gospel, and the Eucharist, and the saints and martyrs, and countless witnesses to God’s love revealed in Christ both living and dead. We have each other. I had you…in the most desperate moment of my life. Because someone came to church here and taught me.
Because someone showed up when they didn’t feel like it, didn’t have the time, weren’t even sure if they really believed. They showed up—you showed up—and it’s changed my life. I became a priest. I'm out there weaving God's love into other people's lives, y'all ain't even met, but what they get from me I got from you!
God will be our refuge and our stronghold. The Holy Spirit will steer and guide this world. And at the last, Christ Jesus will stand upon this earth….
And you are part of Him.
By His Baptism and His Eucharist, you are part of God’s love revealed in Jesus here on this earth, in our time. It is a blessing and a solemn obligation to live lives worthy of that love. For some of the people you encounter, you might be the only way they’ll know God loves them, whether you ever get to see what that means for them or not.
Longing for home is a familiar, ancient, refrain. Yearning for shelter, protection, salvation while we are sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively, exiled—lost and alone—is a very normal part of human life. But God’s people have an answer.
And the answer is the love of God, of Christ.
And it is the privilege, blessing, and obligation of our baptism that if we show up… we can be that love for more people than we will ever know—whether we ever get to see the impact of how we loved one another or not.
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